I got 150+ emails in less than 3 days about Black Friday shopping! And then another stack came in over the weekend about Cyber Monday. The messaging is that every single business has the absolute best deals right now; my life will be incomplete if I don’t take advantage of each one of them.

There were so many that they blurred into each other, intent lost. After scanning many of them, I put together a list of 8 tactics that can make your emails stand out from the pack:

Subject line: A deadline can help improve open rates: “Today Only.” “Ends tonight.” Followed by “Sale extended” and “Almost Over.”

Offer: If you have the capability, send each individual a targeted message based on previous activity or purchases. If you cannot do this, craft an offer by a group with similar characteristics (ie. demographics, age on file, previous activity).

Keep it simple. State a clear offer in the subject line, make the response button stand out, and the email layout easy to navigate.

Sending 4 of the same emails with the same subject line is a cheap tactic. Change it up!

Emojis in the subject line must be the “in” tactic this year to get people to notice the emails. Many, many emojis. I would test whether this improves click-thru rates.

Early specific promotions can also work. For example, Cyber Monday offers started on Sunday to boost sales.

Double check your load times on several browsers. If your content take too long to load, it is likely they will be deleted or ignored.

Free, it still works. Free shipping, free bonus gift, free download, freebies. All those can bump responses, in your email.

While it may be too late to incorporate these ideas into this holiday season promotions, we should all continue testing in 2019. I am such a huge proponent of testing; here is another post I wrote with testing ideas.